Chinese technology company NetEase announced this week that it plans to open a new game development studio in Seattle called Anchor Point Studios.
Anchor Point is a remote company that’s headquartered in both Seattle and Barcelona. Its studio head and CEO, Paul Ehreth, is a veteran game developer who worked at Microsoft and 343 Industries on games like Halo 4 and 2007’s Shadowrun. More recently, Ehreth was the lead designer on Remedy’s surreal 2019 action game Control, and the co-founder of the Redmond, Wash.-based startup NC2 Media.
Ehreth, speaking to GeekWire from Barcelona, describes Anchor Point’s debut project as an “adventurous” action game that will push the limits of Epic’s Unreal Engine 5.2.
While the details of it are still under wraps, Ehreth describes it as “very different from Control in all the best possible ways.”
“There’s so many crazy and exciting ideas that we’re going to be exploring with this game,” Ehreth said. “We’re going to be taking quite a few risks.”
Ehreth is currently based in Barcelona, and describes the local Spanish games industry as “having a lot of fire and passion to it, and seemed like it was just starting up in a lot of ways… it seemed like the energy was here, and the people were here.”
NetEase calls Anchor Point a studio that will produce “AAA” games, which is industry slang for a big-budget production. The definition of AAA typically can mean different things to different people, however.
“Personally I don’t especially care for the term [AAA] because it is so nebulous,” Ehreth said. “What it means for us is that we want to present a polished experience for players. We really want to push the graphics technology quite a bit and take advantage of some of the newest advancements that Unreal has been rolling out.”
Anchor Point consists of 17 people, and plans to hire three more in the next couple of months. Other employees at the studio include CTO Brian Gish, a software engineer who’s worked at Rec Room, Endeavor One, and ArenaNet, and design director Cory Hasselbach, formerly of 343 Industries and Sucker Punch.
This is Ehreth’s first time heading up a development studio of this size. With issues of “crunch” and overwork still dominating recent games-industry discussions, particularly in the AAA space, I asked him what sort of culture he intended to establish for Anchor Point.
“As the leaders, we have to help change the culture by setting the example ourselves, starting with ourselves, and not asking anything from anybody that we aren’t already starting to do ourselves,” Ehreth said. “We want to try new things, and part of encouraging the team to be adventurous is having a safe environment where the team can make mistakes and learn from them.”
That approach is one of the reasons why Ehreth signed the deal with NetEase. “They understood that we care first and foremost about making a really incredible, memorable game,” he said. “We’re not here to rush something out to market or fast-follow on whatever the latest trend is. We want to make something that really speaks to the soul of our players.”
